She turns me on, don't get me wrong

“He who has lived and thought can't help

despising people in his soul;

him who has felt disturbs 

the ghost of irrecoverable days;

for him there are no more enchantments;

him does the snake of memories, 

him does repentance bite.” 

- Alexander Pushkin

And so to the opera. I have been to see a production of 'Eugene Onegin' that was in complete contrast to the previous time I had seen it. Where that had been set on a domestic and familiar scale this had all the opulence of late Imperial Russia, just before they all got their just desserts. It is of course a wonderful piece of late-Romantic music and it got the full treatment from the Northern Chamber Orchestra, the principals and the chorus. I'm going to single out Joshua Bloom's Prince Gremin for special praise although they were all good. What really impressed me was the lighting design which made extensive use of reflection and, particularly, silhouette. All in all it was easy to see why no budget had been left over for the staging of the Caldara piece I mentioned yesterday.

I have to mention however that the behaviour of Onegin and Lensky is no more admirable or sensible when played out among the upper classes of St Petersburg than it is when set amongst the youth of North London. And I've always wondered why when Tatyana is rejecting Onegin in the final act she never mentions the impact his actions must have had on the life of her sister Olga. She is, sadly, no less selfish than the men.

Operatic Queens

"Some may say that I couldn't sing, but no one can say that I didn't sing." - Florence Foster Jenkins

No sooner have I referred to the role of the coarse actor in amateur dramatics, than I have been to see an amateur performance that was very good by being very bad. I have been to see 'Glorious!', the story of Florence Foster Jenkins. My companion for the evening had seen the Meryl Streep film on the same subject and, according to her, it covers the same ground in a very different way. This version was certainly very funny, in particular the transition between the first and second scenes of the second act which was also well directed. I could, however, have done with fewer gay 'jokes'; if there was ever a time when simply saying the word 'pansies' was funny then thankfully it has long gone. Top marks must go to Katrina Wood in the lead role. It must be incredibly hard to sing that badly on purpose if one can sing properly in the first place. Here is Madame Jenkins herself to show what I mean:

I am going to see 'The Magic Flute' soon, and I'm sure that I won't be able to get that rendition out of my head. In the meantime I went to see the live broadcast of 'The Queen of Spades' from the Royal Opera House. Opera directors are seemingly incapable of telling a story straight and this was a high concept production, although I must, grudgingly, say that it largely worked. The main idea was that the composer was on stage throughout, mostly sat behind a piano watching his characters take life, but also with his own story, of his guilt about his homosexuality and his extremely short lived marriage mixed in with Pushkin's novella. If it succeeded it was because they threw the kitchen sink at it theatrically. I was very taken when the male chorus came on stage all dressed as Tchaikovsky, with many of them looking more like him than he did; it was like the occasion when Ernest Hemingway came fifth in an Ernest Hemingway lookalike competition. Here, for the avoidance of doubt, is the real thing:

There is a Mozart pastiche in the ball scene of Act II, and there was coincidentally a reference to 'The Magic Flute' here as well with two sopranos dressed as songbirds alternately wrestling with Tchaikovsky (or possibly with Count Levitsky; it was hard to tell by then) and writhing erotically on the floor together. By no means the most bizarre aspect was when the title character died (apologies for the spoiler, but - once again - it's an opera) they buried her in the piano. Sometimes when things are that weird one just has to go with it. 

John, I'm only dancing

And so to the opera. I have been to see OperaUpClose's production of Eugene Onegin in a new English translation by Robin Norton-Hale which sets the action in the London of my youth. The ball at which the friends Lensky and Onegin fall out over a woman becomes, very plausibly, a teenage birthday party. In fact the more the action developed the more convinced I became that I'd been at the party it was based on. I didn't catch if anyone on stage actually sang "leave him, he's not worth it" or "who are you screwin', John?" (*), but they might has well have done; although I must say that it was all rather more tuneful than the Wood (**) used to be when I was a young man.

Indeed the singing was first class, the two principle men in particular. My companion for the evening was the lady who had taken me to the bassoon concert, but I am pleased to report that the small ensemble contained a clarinet as its woodwind element instead. The reduction in size of the musical accompaniment seemed to me to match perfectly the change in setting from a palace to a living room. If I have one complaint it's that in making the same change, the libretto became slightly banal.

In the penultimate scene Onegin and Tanya meet again for the first time seven years after the evening where he has rejected her love, danced so much with her sister Olga that the sister's boyfriend - his own best friend Lensky - is driven to jealous rage, the two friends fight, Lensky is killed and Onegin forced to flee into exile. All of which is summed up by the line "That evening ended rather badly". You can say that again.


* In the argot of the time, to 'screw' someone was to look at them in a challenging or disrespectful manner.

** As I may have mentioned in a previous post, the Wood was home to 'all the skins and all the hoods'.